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Poetry. Robert Colman's third book of poetry, DEMOCRATICALLY APPLIED MACHINE, is a back-to-basics approach to creation. In poems that inhabit both industrial and domestic landscapes, Colman traces his inheritance to determine how his life echoes that of his forebears, even as the past blurs with the onset of his father's Alzheimer's dementia. These are poems with working parts; poems of lineage and legacy; poems that engage the mechanical world while retaining nature's imprint. DEMOCRATICALLY APPLIED MACHINE is a defining collection from one of Canada's finest poets.

Through the rapidly altered perspectives of romantic relationship and the demands of economic recession, Little Empires pursues what it means to own your changing landscape. In a deft and pithy, elegantly nuanced and urbane style, Robert Colman charts awareness within our fragmenting society, where Tweets drown the present tense, and "purpose" loses its hold on sense. Out of it all comes an enriched appreciation of human connection.

SALEM has long been notorious for the witch trials of 1692. But a hundred years later it was renowned for very different pursuits: vast wealth and worldwide trade. Now Death of an Empire tells the story of Salem's glory days in the age of sailing, and the murder that hastened its descent. When America first became a nation, Salem was the richest city in the republic, led by a visionary merchant who still ranks as one of the wealthiest men in history. For decades, Salem connected America with the wider world, through a large fleet of tall ships and a pragmatic, egalitarian brand of commerce taht remains a model of enlightened international relations. But America's emerging big cities and westward expansion began to erode Salem's national political importance just as its seafaring economy faltered in the face of tariffs and global depression. With Salem's standing as a world capital imperiled, two men, equally favored by fortune, struggled for its future: one, a progressive merchant-politician, tried to build new institutions and businesses, while the other, a reclusive crime lord, offered a demimonde of forbidden pleasures. The scandalous trial that followed signaled Salem's fall from national prominence, a fall that echoed around the world in the loss of friendly trade and in bloody reprisals against native peoples by the U.S. Navy. Death of an Empire is an exciting tale of a remarkably rich era, shedding light on a little-known but fascinating period of Ameriacn history in which characters such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster interact with the ambitious merchants and fearless mariners who made Salem famous around the world.

Robert Colman is a Newmarket, Ontario-based writer and editor. He has been involved in trade publications for the manufacturing industry for more than ten years. Colman is the author of three other full-length collections of poetry, Democratically Applied Machine (Palimpsest Press, 2020), Little Empires (Quattro Books 2012) and The Delicate Line (Exile Editions 2008). He received his MFA from UBC in 2016 and currently serves on the editorial board of PRISM International.

Renewal Journal 6: Worship (2nd edition 2011) contains articles on worship and renewal including: Worship: Intimacy with God, by John & Carol Wimber, Beyond Self-centred Worship, by Geoff Bullock, Worship to Soothe or Disturb? by Dorothy Mathieson, Worship: Touching Body and Soul, by Robert Tann, Healing through Worship, by Robert Colman, Charismatic Worship and Ministry, by Stephen Bryar, Renewal in the Church, by Stan Everitt, Worship God in Dance, by Lucinda Coleman, Revival Worship, by Geoff Waugh